“I—” I start to protest, but stop. There’s one stipulation at the very bottom that Mrs. Santo didn’t mention: she’ll seek criminal charges against me for attempted murder unless I agree to move in and care for her son in perpetuity.
“Take it or leave it,” Mrs. Santo says to me, then pulls out a small recorder and places it on the table. She’s been recording everything.
My anger turns to fear. I have nothing. I sold everything of value, not that I had much, and I only bought a one-way ticket to Santa Fe. Plus, I admitted to my involvement... on tape.
I may be good at counting cards, but I’m an expert at losing everything.
The paper slips from my fingers and flutters to the floor.
Mrs. Santo nods, and the room spins. All I can hear in my head is Rachel’s warning to me years ago: Don’t fuck with La Llorona, or she’ll fuck you right back.
“Welcome home,” says Mrs. Santo.
Part III
What It Feels Like to Be Haunted
Close Quarters
by Jimmy Santiago Baca
Drury Plaza Hotel
Mysticism, of one sort or another, abounds in New Mexico. You’ve got a mountain of it, but since I’ve got a pretty good handle on my way (indigenous) of communing with the spirits, I wasn’t expecting to run smack dab into that mountain recently.
When I’m not writing poetry or burying my head so deep in a novel I wonder what world I’m in, I’m giving lectures, keynoting a conference, running a writing workshop, fishing, hunting, or learning the ABCs on proper and healthy living from my twelve-year-old daughter. (I purposely left out raging at Trumpian Shit Eaters, those loathsome creatures that occupy our cherished democratic nest in DC.)
In this case, I find myself on I-25, driving to Santa Fe to give a keynote at the Santa Fe Drury Plaza Hotel. Didn’t take me long to find.
It was one of those beautiful winter days, and I couldn’t have been feeling any better had you given me Hawaiian dancers and an ounce of cocaine and put me out on an island where I win a lottery ticket every day. No, this was a perfect setting for my soul to join my ancestors and feel that extreme sensation we call... elation? No... nirvana? Maybe, but One With God will suffice in my case for this story.
There I am, I park, the bellman carries in two boxes of my latest books I plan on giving out for free to the graduates. I hit the front desk, check-in goes smoothly. No time for a quick nap (how I wish!). Up to my room to freshen up and then to the ballroom for the talk. I walk in and the kids are everywhere, my eyes travel over the faces and heads of hundreds of beautiful and brilliant DACA students.
They’re typical in all ways except one: they represent the very core of what our democracy means. Most of us are inclined to take our most treasured values for granted — when was the last time you marched for justice? Against police brutality? Environmental justice? Chicanos get beat and jailed every day and most of them are guilty of only one thing: they’re poor, have no money for big-time lawyers (who know how corruption works and can grease its wheels and turn the screws so the wheel of fate turns in their favor — happens every day, we hardly bat an eyelid at it).
They were not all DACA students, but I sure felt honored to be asked to speak by people who fought so hard for the American Dream, and so I gave the best talk of my life, I think. If one is to measure it by the fifteen-minute standing applause they gave me, some leaping up and down whooping as if they were at a rodeo, others whistling and so forth — can’t stand the prim applause of trust-funders, give me the autobahn over the go-cart track any day. After giving away a hundred signed books, I took a group picture, shook hands, and encouraged them to go and enjoy the City Different, see Santa Fe — after all, their ancestors built this city — and continue to maintain it for the pleasure of tourists and the hordes of newcomers.
I skipped the banquet, went right up to my room, looking forward to a good night’s rest. The second I walked in, I felt movement to my right and I looked at the sofa, the area by the wet bar, the fireplace, and attributed my overly sensitive state to exhaustion. My doctor had warned me to slow it down (but whoever listens? If you do, you’re not living).
I wash up in the bathroom and I hear a baby crying in the other room. Again, I go into the entrance room and look around and think the cries are coming from the next room or hallway. I draw the sheets back, grab the remote (I use TV to fall asleep), hit the sack, and before long I’m asleep, when I start hearing and seeing weird stuff in my dreaming and I wake up. I sit up in bed for a bit wondering what is going on and then step to the window and look down at the parking lot and a vague sense comes over me as if I’ve been here before. I hear the crying again and a woman gasping for air and I turn quickly and hurry to the other room and stand in the middle, still as I can, and listen more.
Yes, I hear it again. It’s dark but lit enough to see by the light coming from the other room. I slowly turn and I see her. Them. Man, am I tired, I think, and I run a bath, sink my whole body in until my head is under water, when I hear banging pots and pans in the sink; someone slams a coffee cup down when interrupted in the middle of a sentence; he kicks the chair when she says something dumb; she slams doors and leaves the house. And he yells behind her, “Stop asking me questions when I’m on the phone!”
I surge out of the water, search the bathroom, the other room, the bedroom and parking lot. Has to be the next room or hallways, I think. None of this makes sense — fuck, all that partying in my younger days is finally catching up.
I dry off, put some boxers on, grab a book (Roy’s latest), and read until I fall asleep and hear the faintest murmurs coming from the main room as if a ghost is there. A shadow crosses my bedroom doorway. I get up to adjust the thermostat and find the wall-grill covering on the floor. I hear a pinging and I check the rooms again. On the bathroom counter, decorative glistening pebbles are piled into a pyramid. The mirror is cracked. At different moments, an audible buzzing compresses the space inside and there’s no oxygen and I find it hard to breathe. I hear a woman’s voice whisper my name in the darkness and when I turn to locate the face, the air around my bed makes a sucking sound, as if a presence has slipped away, rattling the glass panes at the window looking out on the parking lot, the panes flung ajar.
I get up to close it (who opened it?) and that’s when I see my grandpa, walking across what was the parking lot but is now an open field. He walks in the dark to the fields to work. From the fields, he goes to the school across the street (the arts academy now) and cleans the classrooms, empties trash cans, and dust-mops the halls. (He dreamed I’d learn to read and write, yet I don’t think he ever believed I’d have dozens of books of poems and be here walking around with other literary types.) I imagine his calloused hands applaud and hear his voice in the lofty pines looming all about. “Eso si mijito, eso si.” That’s right, that’s my boy.